Interim Dean Vijayakumar Bhagavatula

Vijayakumar (Kumar) Bhagavatula is the Interim Dean of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Bhagavatula received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Since 1982, he has been a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Carnegie Mellon where he is now the U.A. & Helen Whitaker Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Bhagavatula has held many leadership positions. He served a the director of Carnegie Mellon University Africa from January 2018 to December 2021 and as the interim vice provost for research (VPR) for CMU in 2017. He also served as the associate dean for graduate and faculty affairs for the College of Engineering from July 2010 to March 2017, associate department head of the ECE Department from 1994 to 1996, as the acting head of the ECE Department from 2004 to 2005.

His research interests include computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms and applications and coding and signal processing for data storage systems. His publications include the book Correlation Pattern Recognition, 22 book chapters, more than 410 conference papers, and 210 journal papers. He is also the co-inventor of 12 patents. He served as a topical editor for Applied Optics and as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

Bhagavatula has served on many conference program committees and was a co-chair of the 2008-2010 SPIE conferences on Biometric Technology for Human Identification, a co-program chair of the 2012 IEEE Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems(BTAS) conference and a program committee co-chair for the 2015 International Conference on Biometrics (ICB). Kumar is a Fellow of IEEE, SPIE, OSA, IAPR (the International Association of Pattern Recognition), AAAS, and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). In 2003, Kumar received the Eta Kappa Nu Award for Excellence in Teaching in the ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon and the College of Engineering’s Dowd Fellowship for educational contributions. He was a co-recipient of the 2008 Outstanding Faculty Research Award in Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering. In 2019, the CMU College of Engineering selected him as the inaugural recipient of the College of Engineering’s Faculty Outstanding Service Award.